Richard J. Evans is president of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and provost of Gresham College, London. His latest book is The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914, a volume in the Penguin History of Europe.

Cite ourselves!

Richard J. Evans

As a graduate student in the 1970s, looking around for new approaches to history that would enable me to do something different from my teachers’ generation, I spent a lot of time with my fellow students discussing the relative attractions of British Marxist historians like Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson, German neo-Weberians such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka, American students of social inequality like Stephan Thernstrom, advocates of a social-anthropological approach such as Keith Thomas, partisans of a politically committed history of everyday life like Raphael Samuel and the History Workshop, and more besides. The world of history seemed then to be not just expanding but exploding, into areas undreamed of by the political and diplomatic historians on whose work we had been brought up.

Among the most exciting of the new approaches was that of the school of French historians associated with the journal Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations. What made their work exciting was, first of all, the sense they conveyed that nothing was off-limits for the historian, no aspect of life too obscure: everything, from birth, death and disease to time, space and distance, from fear, hatred and anxiety to faith, fanaticism and delusion, was open to historical investigation. Then there was the way they ranged across huge stretches of time, crossing conventional barriers of epochs and periods, looking at an enormous variety of aspects of societies in the past. Some, Fernand Braudel among them, took vast geographical areas as their subject, and showed how key structures of human existence transcended the conventional boundaries of the state; others took one province or town and linked together in a complex but convincing causal web, underpinned by painstaking statistical research, the history of its economic, demographic, social and (often rather sketchily) political structures. Like others of my generation, I became fascinated by all this, and ended up doing my own version of a regional study, linking what the Annales historians called structure and conjoncture in a book on cholera in Hamburg in 1892. The city was the only one in Western or Central Europe to fall victim to an epidemic in that year, the causes and consequences of which I traced in the economic, demographic, social and political history of the city across the 19th century.

A quarter of a century or more later, writing about Annales and its history has become a minor scholarly industry. We now know a great deal about where it came from, what it has done and how it developed. The private correspondence of its founding fathers has been published, conferences have been held about them, introductory surveys to their work and that of their successors have been written, dissertations and monographs have poured off the academic presses. Is there anything new to say? In The Annales School: An Intellectual History, André Burguière, the long-serving administrative secretary of the journal, surveys the history of Annales once more. As an insider who knew many of the protagonists from the 1960s on, he has a distinct advantage over many of his competitors. But seeing the journal’s development from the inside has disadvantages too. True to his allegiance to Annales principles, he tells the reader sternly: ‘Do not expect to find in this book a history of events.’ This alone makes the book extremely difficult for anyone unfamiliar with the basic history of the journal and the historians associated with it. More seriously, Burguière is unable to stand outside the history he is analysing and break free from the many myths with which it has become encrusted.

These begin with the journal’s foundation in 1929. Edited by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, both professors at the University of Strasbourg, it was entitled Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, and from the beginning proclaimed its ambition to play a leading role in the field of economic and social history in France. Bloch and Febvre advocated a broadening of the historian’s vision to encompass not only standard topics of economic history such as trade and currency, agrarian society, transport and technology, but also values, sensibilities and feelings. Their aim was to create a new style of thought, as they announced in 1937, that would present new research, publish lengthy critical analyses of other people’s work and, crucially, gather a group of much younger collaborators dedicated to what soon became known as the ‘spirit of the Annales’.

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Letters

Richard J. Evans suggests that Fernand Braudel, writing his history of the Mediterranean in a German prisoner-of-war camp, may have developed his abiding fascination with the ‘longue durée’ as a ‘consolation for the disastrous turn events had taken in the present’ (LRB, 3 December). This may well be the case, but other members of the Annales School, notably Lucien Febvre, had less honourable reasons for dismissing events as mere ‘dust’. When the Germans occupied France, Annales was at risk of being banned because one of its owners, Marc Bloch, was Jewish. Febvre, his co-owner, persuaded Bloch not only to relinquish his share in the journal, but to remove his name from the editorial board in order to present an ‘Aryan’ face to the Germans. Bloch, who continued to contribute under the pen name ‘Fougères’, went into the maquis, and, in 1944, was captured, tortured and executed. Febvre had a comparatively peaceful war, but this didn’t prevent him trying to pass himself off as a résistant when, after the war, he was trying to obtain paper then in short supply. In a letter to the minister of information, unearthed by the historian Philippe Burrin, Febvre claimed that ‘alone among all the French historical journals’, Annales had maintained a spirit of resistance, ‘jusqu’au bout’.

Richard Evans suspects that I haven’t read Lutz Raphael’s Die Erben von Bloch und Febvre, though it is cited in the bibliography of my book, The Annales School: An Intellectual History (LRB, 3 December 2009). I can only say that such a practice is perhaps admitted in Cambridge, but not in Paris. I would like to reassure him: I do read and speak German, and I did read Raphael’s book. Nevertheless, his approach to the Annales School’s evolution since the 1950s, by focusing on its institutional task and development, did not fit the analysis I was making in my book.

I am not sure, however, that Professor Evans read my book properly. Leaving aside the memory of his own encounter with the works of the Annales School when he was a young scholar, his piece is a not uninteresting survey of the academic expansion of the Annales School since the foundation of the Sixth Section of the Ecole Pratique, drawn largely from Raphael’s book. But he does not refer to the main topic of my book: the historiographical destiny of the concept of mentalités.